Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment
Improving our understanding of the global environment, and how it is affected by human activities

Beth Tellman

Position title: Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

Email: beth.tellman@wisc.edu

 

Beth Tellman (she/her) joined UW–Madison in 2025, where she leads a research group combining AI, satellite data, and social science to study global environmental change, with a focus on flood risk and land systems. She co-led the Global Flood Database, featured on the cover of Nature in 2021, which revealed that populations are moving into flood-prone areas at rates 8–10 times higher than previously estimated.  

She directs the Social[Pixel] Lab at the Nelson Institute’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), working with students and postdocs to develop deep learning architectures, satellite-based datasets, and social science frameworks to answer socially relevant questions about flood risk, land use change, and climate adaptation. Dr. Tellman has raised over $3.5 million in research funding as PI and Co-PI across federal agencies, foundations, and industry. 

Beyond her work at UW, Dr. Tellman is a business leader and social entrepreneur. In 2015, she co-founded Floodbase, an AI company enabling parametric flood insurance and serves as its Chief Science Officer. In 2022, she co-founded FLUJOS (Flood Justice Utilizing Satellite Observation), partnering with organizations in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas to integrate lived experience and satellite data to build flood resilience in colonia communities. In 2020, she co-founded Umbela, an NGO in Mexico promoting environmental transformation from Global South perspectives. 

Dr. Tellman has been recognized as a leading global environmental change scientist whose interdisciplinary methods bridge remote sensing, machine learning, and geography. Her honors include the National Sustainability Society Emerging Scholar Award (2025), Leading Woman in Machine Learning for Earth Observation (Radiant Earth Foundation, 2022), a NASA Early Career Investigator Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and an NCAR Faculty Innovator Fellowship. 

Trained as a geographer, she earned a B.Sc. from Santa Clara University, an M.S. in Environmental Science from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Geography from Arizona State University.